


either in pain or thus in sympathy

by gogollescent



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-18
Updated: 2013-10-18
Packaged: 2017-12-29 18:03:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1008398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A lazy, mocking gesture, half-salute: you understood that she had touched the place she thought her heart was. From where you sat, it looked more like her stomach.</p>
            </blockquote>





	either in pain or thus in sympathy

On the morning after Ymir dropped Dazz over the side of a cliff, you woke to find her sitting, uncharacteristically neat, at the edge of your bed at the waystation, with one bare foot drawn up to rest against her knee and the other set flat on the floorboards. You could attest the perpendicular line of her heel because at some point in the night you had rolled halfway off the bunk. You didn't _know_ it was her—you opened your eyes and saw an inverted landscape of wood and dust-balls, with the single columnar calf extending out of the plain, in proper Titan fashion; except there were also the sharp, pinched shapes of her toenails to consider, each yellowed half-moon glossy against darker olive skin. She had stupidly beautiful feet. After a moment, you stopped pretending not to recognize them.

“What time is it?”

“So you're awake,” she said, impervious. You pulled your arm and head back onto the mattress, and she reached out with one absent hand to smooth your hair, like a priest with a blessing to dispose of. That fast professional presumption. You waited for her fingers stray down to the level of your eye, and blinked, slow. She let her hand fall away.

“I don't know, six?”

The snow-pocked light of daybreak bore her out. “They'll want us back on the trail.”

“What, with our teammate stalking death?” She had trouble with idioms. A lazy, mocking gesture, half-salute: you understood that she had touched the place she thought her heart was. From where you sat, it looked more like her stomach. “Who could be so cold?”

“Instructor Shadis,” you said, firmly. “Icicles, Ymir. Whiteouts.”

She smiled. “He is frosty.”

“—How long have you been up, anyway?”

“Not so long.”

That was a lie, you thought. She still hadn't moved her feet.

It was silly, but the longer the silence stretched, the more you were reminded of the weeds that grew in Stohess. Pushing up between flat cobblestones in knots of blue and ivory. Ymir, if allowed to be vegetal, was still older, bolder, more lovely and permanent; but she seemed likewise to represent a thing that could be sealed off in parts, with one curious tendril—this lean girl's back and steady, arranged limbs—intruding through the barrier's first flaw. As though thin air and dissolved gloom were another form of stonework, and beyond them, crawling, lay the roots.

“I... wanted to talk to you last night.”

“I think we talked a lot.”

“I meant, after—!” Dazz, sitting upright, accepting soup from the cabin's owners. Ymir lowering her hood. _When I reveal this secret of mine..._ And you'd gone to sleep. How had you done it, with that extracted promise hot on your tongue, a coin warmed first by someone else's fist? You could imagine it clearly: yourself, a packed-ice sculpture, and the metal melting through jaw and throat to lodge in your hard lungs. You almost heard it clink when you took breath.

If she was vast, then you were shrinking, worn away by her invading spring.

“Don't be too hard on yourself,” said Ymir, over whatever you would have added. “It was a long walk from the top.”

“Is that supposed to be a metaphor?”

That got a frown from her. “A what? For what?” She leaned forward, bracing her hands against her smooth raised ankle, and seemed to hesitate over her next words. “Do you like poetry?”

“No!”

“Fine, fine. I can't rhyme for shit.” She nibbled on her lip, near-pensive. “I just meant… you were tired. Asleep on your feet. So it's not your fault if you couldn't delve into my mysterious past straightaway.”

You pushed the sheets back. She turned her head, watching you from the corner of her eye, her iris a flash of gold with all the force of secret riches. You were ready to be angry, as pained and rocky a feeling as when she threw you to the ground to make you let go of Dazz's sledge, but you couldn't ignore the tender line of her neck, her bent head, and her private, hoarded, innocent amusement. “Did you really rob a church?” you asked instead.

“I told you,” said Ymir, “I was borrowing money. Churches are supposed to be charitable, right.”

“Yes,” you said, and did laugh a little.

There was a companionable silence. You were still tired. She unfolded her right leg and slid over to kiss the corner of your mouth: and then, with more enthusiasm, your ear, sucking on the lobe as though the weight of her mouth and teeth could supplant the jewelry of childhood. The hole had long since closed over. You reached for her neck, not sure whether you should put her off or reel her in, distracted by the gritty skin at her nape and the prospect of untying her dark hair. You were both filthy, in a way the cold could mediate but not disguise, and when you licked your finger and brushed it under her lip it made a pale stripe of skin, a faint false scar. All relative, beneath dawn's whiter eye.

“Ymir.”

“Mm,” she said, against your neck, the slatted underside of the bunk above you extending from behind her outline like tilled brown land. Alternating stripes of shade and grain. But a field in miniature, viewed through vertical miles, so that you might have been the one pushed to last night's dark precipice.

" _Ymir_..."

“—What? Do you have something else to ask?”

Not at the price she'd offered you. And yet: having screwed around with her before in all earnestness—having been fingered until you let out a truly embarrassing squeak, in the consensus-based 'privacy' of the barracks—you nevertheless felt, awkwardly, as if you were embarking on a novel descent. You'd thought, once... you hadn't understood why she would pick you of all people to befriend, but you had figured it for the kind of accident that only seemed loaded with importance because it _had_ happened, in place of whatever alternative: loneliness, you'd assumed. Now you knew better. It came over you in deep unnavigable waves, the foam of shock and crisp renewed delight, trapping and multiplying a still-ascendant star. The memory of Ymir saying, we're alike, you and I. She had left the underworld to find you, when she had never seen your face.

Who was it who first told you about the ocean? Not Armin, reciting pages from his lost books when drunk. It had been earlier, much earlier; some tangled castle garden, and a kindly man with your fine blond hair regarding you in benign stupefaction. Everyone from your childhood seemed to know more than you would later be told was possible or correct. Their attitude of complacence, their unlimited self-possession, were all at odds with the world you had found beyond Sina—which was small, sterile and answerless, less ruled than held in stewardship for your ravenous foes.

And yet Ymir was unaffected. Pried from the dubious interiority of the center's center, she had retained the Sina quality of egregious faith. At least, you thought she must have; how else could she fling a person off a mountaintop, and expect him to survive the fall? How else could she have followed you into the military, and parsed your every action as an ineffectual penance, and still remained, unless possessed by that calm lordling's dream: the idea that one lived, wherever one was, not in a cage but in the manor of one's choosing. That she was not hemmed in by death and lack; that she might, at any moment, take a horse and ride out, to build towers and cities by the sea.

Except Dazz had lived. Maybe, you thought, for Ymir it's not a delusion. Maybe to Ymir the world has no end.

“Tell me you didn't just doze off while I was unbuttoning your shirt.”

You jerked your head so that your chin connected, hard, with the part of her hair. “Ow!” She tried to duck away, but you clasped her head to your chest, kicking and rolling until she was pinioned under you, her ribcage between your thighs a solid, squirming heat. “Ymir, listen,” you said, overwhelmed by how significant you both finally seemed; none of the floating poignancy of your dilemma the night before, but only dense perception, and the transmitted starts from her taut body under yours. You eased down the length of her torso to straddle her hips, your shirt open and your chest very cold where the air flooded it; and she tipped her head back, eyes shut and dark, vapor rising from her open mouth like smoke from wetted coals—or like the outthrust wing of a caught white bird, still alive, struggling, but halfway down her gullet. You leaned in to swallow what escaped.

She went still when you sat up again. Your hands framed her collarbone. “Are you going to tell me your name?” she asked, with rare simplicity. You did not think she really believed you would do it; but she stared at your face, a live spark or claw of courage in her glance, and gave no sign of where her best hopes lay.

“What I don't understand is how you heard my whole story without one of the priests mentioning it.”

“It's hardly something I'm likely to lie about, is it?”

“I don't know,” you said, but it wasn't true. As tired as you were, as afraid, you had discovered that you also kept a piece of what propelled lives in Stohess. That was, the pride. The pure hardening certainty that you could lever the earth with a word. Or the part of the earth that was left under your feet.

So, nameless, you asked your question.

“You won't say how you got Dazz down unharmed. All right. But be honest: if it had been me who passed out, and not him… Would you have let me fall?”

“Christa,” said Ymir, without a pause, “I would have carried you down on my back.”


End file.
